Clockwork Princess

asked when they were kidnapped, and it had always annoyed her, but she realized now that it actually made good sense. In this sort of situation the first thing you wanted to know was where you were going.
    “To Mortmain,” said Mrs. Black. “And that’s all the information you’ll get out of me, girl. I have been given strict instructions.”
    It was nothing Tessa hadn’t expected, but it tightened her chest and shortened her breath anyway. On impulse she leaned away from Mrs. Black and pulled back the curtain across her window.
    Outside it was dark, with a half-hidden moon. The countryside was hilly and angular, without spots of light to be seen that might have meant habitation. Black heaps of rock dotted the land. Tessa reached as subtly as she could for the handle of the door and tried it; it was locked.
    “Do not bother,” said the Dark Sister. “You cannot unlock the door, and if you were to flee, I would catch you. I am much faster now than you recall.”
    “Is that how you disappeared on the steps?” Tessa demanded. “Back at the Institute?”
    Mrs. Black gave a superior smile. “Disappeared to your eyes. I only moved swiftly away, and then back again. Mortmain has given me that gift.”
    “Is that why you’re doing this?” Tessa spat. “Gratitude for Mortmain? He didn’t think much of you. He sent Jem and Will to kill you when he thought you were going to get in his way.”
    The moment she said Jem’s and Will’s names, she blanched with memory. She had been carried off while the Shadowhunters had been fighting desperately for their lives on the Institute steps. Had they held out against the automatons? Had any of them been injured, or, God forbid it, killed? But surely she would know, be able to feel it, if anything like that had happened to Jem or to Will? She was so conscious of them both as pieces of her heart.
    “No,” said Mrs. Black. “To answer the question in your eyes, you wouldn’t know if either of them were dead, those pretty Shadowhunter boys you like so much. So people always imagine, but unless there exists a magical tie like the
parabatai
bond, it is but a fanciful imagining. When I left, they were fighting for their lives.” She grinned, and her teeth sparked, metallic in the dimness. “If I did not have orders from Mortmain to bring you to him unharmed, I would have left you there to be cut into strips.”
    “Why does he want you to bring me to him unharmed?”
    “You and your questions. I had nearly forgotten how annoying it was. There is some information he wants that only you can provide him. And he still wants to marry you. The more fool him. Let you devil him all his life for all I mind; I want what I want from him, and then I will be gone.”
    “There’s nothing I could possibly know that would interest Mortmain!”
    Mrs. Black snorted. “You are so young and stupid. You are not human, Miss Gray, and there is very little you understand about what you can do. We might have taught you more, but you were recalcitrant. You will find Mortmain a less lenient instructor.”
    “Lenient?” Tessa snapped. “You beat me bloody.”
    “There are worse things than physical pain, Miss Gray. Mortmain has little mercy.”
    “Exactly.” Tessa leaned forward, her clockwork angel beating double time under the bodice of her dress. “Why do what he asks you? You know you can’t trust him, you know he would happily destroy you—”
    “I need what he can give me,” Mrs. Black said. “And I will do what I must do to obtain it.”
    “And what is that?” Tessa demanded.
    She heard Mrs. Black laugh, and then the Dark Sister slipped back her hood and unfastened the collar of her cloak.
    Tessa had read in history books about heads on spikes over London Bridge, but she had never imagined how horrific it would actually look. Obviously whatever decay Mrs. Black had suffered after her head had been severed had not been reversed, so ragged gray skin hung down around the spike of metal that impaled her skull. She had no body, only a smooth column of metal from which two sticklike jointed arms protruded. The gray kid gloves that covered whatever sort of hands jutted from the ends of the arms added the last macabre touch.
    Tessa screamed.

12
G HOSTS ON THE R OAD
    Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell,
Is it, in Heav’n, a crime to love too well?
To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,
To act a lover’s or a Roman’s part?
Is there no bright reversion in the sky,
For